Navigating the Prompt Space: Improving LLM Classification of Social Science Texts Through Prompt Engineering

Recent developments in text classification using Large Language Models (LLMs) in the social sciences suggest that costs can be cut significantly, while performance can sometimes rival existing computational methods. However, with a wide variance in performance in current tests, we move to the question of how to maximize performance. In this paper, we focus on prompt context as a possible avenue for increasing accuracy by systematically varying three aspects of prompt engineering: label descriptions, instructional nudges, and few shot examples. Across two different examples, our tests illustrate that a minimal increase in prompt context yields the highest increase in performance, while further increases in context only tend to yield marginal performance increases thereafter. Alarmingly, increasing prompt context sometimes decreases accuracy. Furthermore, our tests suggest substantial heterogeneity across models, tasks, and batch size, underlining the need for individual validation of each LLM coding task rather than reliance on general rules.

IndoBERT-Relevancy: A Context-Conditioned Relevancy Classifier for Indonesian Text

Determining whether a piece of text is relevant to a given topic is a fundamental task in natural language processing, yet it remains largely unexplored for Bahasa Indonesia. Unlike sentiment analysis or named entity recognition, relevancy classification requires the model to reason about the relationship between two inputs simultaneously: a topical context and a candidate text. We introduce IndoBERT-Relevancy, a context-conditioned relevancy classifier built on IndoBERT Large (335M parameters) and trained on a novel dataset of 31,360 labeled pairs spanning 188 topics. Through an iterative, failure-driven data construction process, we demonstrate that no single data source is sufficient for robust relevancy classification, and that targeted synthetic data can effectively address specific model weaknesses. Our final model achieves an F1 score of 0.948 and an accuracy of 96.5%, handling both formal and informal Indonesian text. The model is publicly available at HuggingFace.

Seeing Like Radiologists: Context- and Gaze-Guided Vision-Language Pretraining for Chest X-rays

Despite recent advances in medical vision-language pretraining, existing models still struggle to capture the diagnostic workflow: radiographs are typically treated as context-agnostic images, while radiologists' gaze -- a crucial cue for visual reasoning -- remains largely underexplored by existing methods. These limitations hinder the modeling of disease-specific patterns and weaken cross-modal alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce CoGaze, a Context- and Gaze-guided vision-language pretraining framework for chest X-rays. We first propose a context-infused vision encoder that models how radiologists integrate clinical context -- including patient history, symptoms, and diagnostic intent -- to guide diagnostic reasoning. We then present a multi-level supervision paradigm that (1) enforces intra- and inter-modal semantic alignment through hybrid-positive contrastive learning, (2) injects diagnostic priors via disease-aware cross-modal representation learning, and (3) leverages radiologists' gaze as probabilistic priors to guide attention toward diagnostically salient regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoGaze consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse tasks, achieving up to +2.0% CheXbertF1 and +1.2% BLEU2 for free-text and structured report generation, +23.2% AUROC for zero-shot classification, and +12.2% Precision@1 for image-text retrieval. Code is available at https://github.com/mk-runner/CoGaze.

Beyond Via: Analysis and Estimation of the Impact of Large Language Models in Academic Papers

Through an analysis of arXiv papers, we report several shifts in word usage that are likely driven by large language models (LLMs) but have not previously received sufficient attention, such as the increased frequency of "beyond" and "via" in titles and the decreased frequency of "the" and "of" in abstracts. Due to the similarities among different LLMs, experiments show that current classifiers struggle to accurately determine which specific model generated a given text in multi-class classification tasks. Meanwhile, variations across LLMs also result in evolving patterns of word usage in academic papers. By adopting a direct and highly interpretable linear approach and accounting for differences between models and prompts, we quantitatively assess these effects and show that real-world LLM usage is heterogeneous and dynamic.

Clash of the models: Comparing performance of BERT-based variants for generic news frame detection

Framing continues to remain one of the most extensively applied theories in political communication. Developments in computation, particularly with the introduction of transformer architecture and more so with large language models (LLMs), have naturally prompted scholars to explore various novel computational approaches, especially for deductive frame detection, in recent years. While many studies have shown that different transformer models outperform their preceding models that use bag-of-words features, the debate continues to evolve regarding how these models compare with each other on classification tasks. By placing itself at this juncture, this study makes three key contributions: First, it comparatively performs generic news frame detection and compares the performance of five BERT-based variants (BERT, RoBERTa, DeBERTa, DistilBERT and ALBERT) to add to the debate on best practices around employing computational text analysis for political communication studies. Second, it introduces various fine-tuned models capable of robustly performing generic news frame detection. Third, building upon numerous previous studies that work with US-centric data, this study provides the scholarly community with a labelled generic news frames dataset based on the Swiss electoral context that aids in testing the contextual robustness of these computational approaches to framing analysis.

Cross-Modal Prototype Alignment and Mixing for Training-Free Few-Shot Classification

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP are trained with the objective of aligning text and image pairs. To improve CLIP-based few-shot image classification, recent works have observed that, along with text embeddings, image embeddings from the training set are an important source of information. In this work we investigate the impact of directly mixing image and text prototypes for few-shot classification and analyze this from a bias-variance perspective. We show that mixing prototypes acts like a shrinkage estimator. Although mixed prototypes improve classification performance, the image prototypes still add some noise in the form of instance-specific background or context information. In order to capture only information from the image space relevant to the given classification task, we propose projecting image prototypes onto the principal directions of the semantic text embedding space to obtain a text-aligned semantic image subspace. These text-aligned image prototypes, when mixed with text embeddings, further improve classification. However, for downstream datasets with poor cross-modal alignment in CLIP, semantic alignment might be suboptimal. We show that the image subspace can still be leveraged by modeling the anisotropy using class covariances. We demonstrate that combining a text-aligned mixed prototype classifier and an image-specific LDA classifier outperforms existing methods across few-shot classification benchmarks.

An Experimental Comparison of the Most Popular Approaches to Fake News Detection

In recent years, fake news detection has received increasing attention in public debate and scientific research. Despite advances in detection techniques, the production and spread of false information have become more sophisticated, driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) and the amplification power of social media. We present a critical assessment of 12 representative fake news detection approaches, spanning traditional machine learning, deep learning, transformers, and specialized cross-domain architectures. We evaluate these methods on 10 publicly available datasets differing in genre, source, topic, and labeling rationale. We address text-only English fake news detection as a binary classification task by harmonizing labels into "Real" and "Fake" to ensure a consistent evaluation protocol. We acknowledge that label semantics vary across datasets and that harmonization inevitably removes such semantic nuances. Each dataset is treated as a distinct domain. We conduct in-domain, multi-domain and cross-domain experiments to simulate real-world scenarios involving domain shift and out-of-distribution data. Fine-tuned models perform well in-domain but struggle to generalize. Cross-domain architectures can reduce this gap but are data-hungry, while LLMs offer a promising alternative through zero- and few-shot learning. Given inherent dataset confounds and possible pre-training exposure, results should be interpreted as robustness evaluations within this English, text-only protocol.

Unlocking Few-Shot Capabilities in LVLMs via Prompt Conditioning and Head Selection

Current Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) excel at many zero-shot tasks like image captioning, visual question answering and OCR. However, these same models suffer from poor performance at image classification tasks, underperforming against CLIP-based methods. Notably, this gap is surprising because many LVLMs use CLIP-pretrained vision encoders. Yet LVLMs are not inherently limited by CLIP's architecture with independent vision and text encoders. In CLIP, this separation biases classification toward class-name matching rather than joint visual-text reasoning. In this paper we show that, despite their poor raw performance, LVLMs can improve visual feature class separability at inference using prompt conditioning, and LVLMs' internal representations, especially attention heads, can outperform the model itself at zero-shot and few-shot classification. We introduce Head Ensemble Classifiers (HEC) to bridge the performance gap between CLIP-based and LVLM-based classification methods. Inspired by Gaussian Discriminant Analysis, HEC ranks the most discriminative vision and text heads and combines them into a training-free classifier. We show that HEC achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot and zero-shot classification across 12 datasets.

Argument Mining as a Text-to-Text Generation Task

Argument Mining(AM) aims to uncover the argumentative structures within a text. Previous methods require several subtasks, such as span identification, component classification, and relation classification. Consequently, these methods need rule-based postprocessing to derive argumentative structures from the output of each subtask. This approach adds to the complexity of the model and expands the search space of the hyperparameters. To address this difficulty, we propose a simple yet strong method based on a text-to-text generation approach using a pretrained encoder-decoder language model. Our method simultaneously generates argumentatively annotated text for spans, components, and relations, eliminating the need for task-specific postprocessing and hyperparameter tuning. Furthermore, because it is a straightforward text-to-text generation method, we can easily adapt our approach to various types of argumentative structures. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, as it achieves state-of-the-art performance on three different types of benchmark datasets: the Argument-annotated Essays Corpus(AAEC), AbstRCT, and the Cornell eRulemaking Corpus(CDCP)

DAGverse: Building Document-Grounded Semantic DAGs from Scientific Papers

Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) are widely used to represent structured knowledge in scientific and technical domains. However, datasets for real-world DAGs remain scarce because constructing them typically requires expert interpretation of domain documents. We study Doc2SemDAG construction: recovering a preferred semantic DAG from a document together with the cited evidence and context that explain it. This problem is challenging because a document may admit multiple plausible abstractions, the intended structure is often implicit, and the supporting evidence is scattered across prose, equations, captions, and figures. To address these challenges, we leverage scientific papers containing explicit DAG figures as a natural source of supervision. In this setting, the DAG figure provides the DAG structure, while the accompanying text provides context and explanation. We introduce DAGverse, a framework for constructing document-grounded semantic DAGs from online scientific papers. Its core component, DAGverse-Pipeline, is a semi-automatic system designed to produce high-precision semantic DAG examples through figure classification, graph reconstruction, semantic grounding, and validation. As a case study, we test the framework for causal DAGs and release DAGverse-1, a dataset of 108 expert-validated semantic DAGs with graph-level, node-level, and edge-level evidence. Experiments show that DAGverse-Pipeline outperforms existing Vision-Language Models on DAG classification and annotation. DAGverse provides a foundation for document-grounded DAG benchmarks and opens new directions for studying structured reasoning grounded in real-world evidence.